Saturday Waffling (May 25th, 2013)

Whatever shall we do with no new episode to discuss? I've no idea, actually, but here's the discussion thread for it.

By the time you're reading this the brilliant Anna Wiggins, who's contributed guest essays to both blog and book, will be visiting us for the weekend. So that will be fun. I think she, my wife, and I are going to do a demo podcast commentary, just to see how bad we are at it to start and how many things we need to learn to do or not to do. I've also just sent out the first set of Kickstarter rewards (the ebook starter kit), so that's satisfying too. Especially since those rewards cost me nothing to fulfill.

And I've got the Hinchcliffe-era revisions mainly done - at the time of writing (probably a bit obsolete by the time you read this) I'm in the midst of The Hand of Fear, which means the next one is a bit of a hill to climb, but a fun one. This doesn't mean the book is imminent - I've written no extra essays and it has to all be copyedited - but it means it's at a nice clip. I'll move on to Hartnell after this, where I expect far fewer changes. Let's see if I'm right and don't just start getting terribly annoyed with my old arguments and decide that it's time to rewatch and rewrite The Crusade in its entirety.

Speaking of which, are there any things either in the first Hartnell book or the Hinchcliffe era Tom Baker stuff where people think there's room for improvement? I'm already going to rephrase the infamous "trust nobody who lists Hartnell or McGann as their favorite Doctor" line and have rewritten the Masque of Mandragora post heavily, but if there's anything else you're unsatisfied by, please do let me know. (I'm talking bits where you think my argument is wonky or where I miss something huge - not typos, which will get fixed in copyediting.)

Actually, while we're doing self-critique, how's the new six-times-a-week blogging working for you? Are the off-day posts on topics to your liking? Are there things you'd like to see more of? Less of?

And finally, extra essays for the Baker book. I'm currently thinking Managra, Corpse Marker, one of the Baker/Leela Big Finish audios (which one's good?) and... I dunno. Something else obvious and big I should deal with? No guarantees I'll go with a suggestion, but I'm always open to them.

And, of course, how's your weekend?

You Were Expecting Someone Else 22 (Eccleston Comics, the 2006 Annual, Doctor Who Magazine)

Let us pause for a moment to consider the survivors of the Wilderness Years in the general case. Big Finish, of course, was relatively untouched. We covered much of their future at the tail end of the Wilderness Years, and will check in on them a few times more (off the top of my head I can think of at least six Big Finish essays on post-2005 material that I intend to write, some as book-exclusives, some here), but the basic arc is sensible enough: they got their license renewed fairly soon after the new series started, largely through the personal intervention of Davies, who actively kept the issue from crossing Mal Young’s desk. They were forbidden from making any new series references, and in fact occasionally had characters taken away from them when the TV series wanted them, but they quickly developed their niche of the classic series.

The book line, as we’ve seen, fared rather more poorly, a final victim of the decision to take the license away from Virgin. Under a third party license they could well have survived in the same way that Big Finish did, particularly if, like Big Finish, they had a bunch of respectable and upstanding people involved with them. (e.g. Rebecca Levene) But having been taken in house they were a victim of the BBC’s Great Leap Forward, cut off as part of a sensible but nevertheless painful decision to thoroughly rebrand Doctor Who as a show of the present instead of the past. It’s the worst sort of decision. On the one hand, it’s next to impossible to argue with as any sort of a business move - only the most blinkered fan would seriously suggest that the new series would have been more successful if it had played up the forty-two years of prior continuity more. On the other, for anyone who loves that history it’s a body blow.

And then there’s Doctor Who Magazine. Russell T Davies was a huge fan of the magazine, and upon taking over Doctor Who promptly approached them to cement the relationship between show and magazine. We have, of course, seen this before in the period where John Nathan-Turner saw the transformation of Doctor Who Weekly, a glorified Doctor Who comic book, into Doctor Who Monthly, a paratext to the series that elicited continual fan engagement. The results were, to say the least, mixed, in no small part because Nathan-Turner’s skill at publicity outstripped his skill at making television.

Tied into the problems, however, was what I have in the past referred to as the fan-industrial complex - the often toxic interplay in which prominent fans were tacitly bribed with access in exchange for their endorsement of the party line. This process led to deeply unfortunate moments like the canonization of the “fact” that John Nathan-Turner saved the program from the “crap” version that Graham Williams made, which we’ve discussed previously. Actually, let’s pause here for a moment and offer something of an addendum to previous blog posts, since there are several spots where, shall we say, new information has come to light that alters past stories. Let’s just go to the best example ever to surface of how mind-wrenchingly vile the fan-industrial complex is, so that when we circle back to Doctor Who Magazine and the comics we understand the stakes involved in this.

Since writing up the John Nathan-Turner era Richard Marson’s biography of Nathan-Turner, JN-T, has come out and gotten press coverage. I’ve still not gotten around to importing my copy yet - $25 paperbacks I have to import from the UK are a bit of a pain in the neck, and I figure I’ll wait until I’m revising the era to get really into that. But one thing that came out of that was a series of tabloid-fodder revelations about Nathan-Turner’s sexual escapades with young men. I’m not going to litigate the extent of the scandal here, but I want to point out something about fandom’s relationship with it. Let’s look at Ian Levine, unofficial continuity advisor to the Nathan-Turner era and exemplar of the problems with the fan industrial complex. In a 2012 interview about the Marson book, Levine proclaimed that “things went on that were horrible, corrupt, too awful to discuss.”

Levine, let’s stress, was one of the fans routinely paid in access - indeed, that was the crux of his status as unofficial continuity advisor. Levine provided interviews for the book, in other words, and is one of the sources Marson’s book is based on. His quote about the horrors of what happened under Nathan-Turner, in other words, is made by someone who knew about them at the time and was in a position to do something about it, or at the very least walk away. Instead he stayed for his access, in exactly the way that you’d expect someone who considers making fewer than fourteen episodes of Doctor Who a year evil and boycotts grocery stores for promoting Britain’s Got Talent due purely to it being on opposite Doctor Who to do. Ian Levine at once thought what was going on was horrible and corrupt and willingly remained a part of it just so that he could be in contact with Doctor Who.

That’s the toxicity of the fan-industrial complex in a nutshell, and why the use of Doctor Who Magazine primarily as a promotional vehicle for the new series is at least slightly chilling. Not, to be clear, that Doctor Who Magazine’s editorial staff in the 1980s have any culpability in the sex scandals. Rather that the relationship of having an official mouthpiece within fandom is one fraught with peril. If Levine provides the most ethically unnerving example, we can go for the far tamer and sillier one of Doctor Who Magazine running positive reviews of Warriors of the Deep and The Twin Dilemma if we want an example that merely makes Doctor Who Magazine look kind of crap instead of hinting at a sweeping ethical denunciation. I’d argue that one is just the other in miniature, but never mind that.

All of which said, it’s not as though Doctor Who Magazine in the wilderness years was without fault. It ground its axes when it saw fit. The transformation at the start of the John Nathan-Turner era was not a transformation of the magazine into something that was on the production team’s side, it was a transformation of it into something that was on any side at all instead of just producing Doctor Who comics. Nobody seriously expects the official magazine to badmouth the series. This is how the relationship has to work. That it was so disastrous in the past is less a product of the inherent corruption of engaging with fandom and more a product of the fact that in the 1980s the notion of fandom was still so undeveloped that Nathan-Turner’s pioneering fan engagement was doomed to failure even though it was, in fact, the wave of the future.

All of which is to say that by 2005 Doctor Who Magazine was an altogether more competent package, a fact that both Davies and the magazine’s editors deserve credit for. The heart of this is that things had changed dramatically in twenty years. “Professional fan,” in 2005, was a designation that existed, and Doctor Who Magazine was well staffed with dutiful professionals (who, notably, were not employed directly by the BBC). Davies, meanwhile, was himself enough of a fan of Doctor Who Magazine to want it to succeed, as opposed to just treating it as a product line he inherited (which, let’s be honest, it always rather seemed like he did with the books). And perhaps most importantly, Davies lived in Doctor Who fandom - the actual, bitchily wonderful fandom that existed - and had no interest in its dismantling or undermining.

The result was that even as Doctor Who Magazine became a glossy echo chamber of praise for the very act of making Doctor Who in which every episode is previewed extensively, every actor and designer is interviewed in glowing terms, and the entire magazine is caught up in a sort of unceasing frenzied ecstasy over the existence of Doctor Who, it remained… surprisingly intelligent. Sure, there are fawning interviews with everybody under the sun, but it turns out that the people working on Doctor Who are often really intelligent people with interesting things to say. Yes, Davies’s production notes are full of unapologetic teases and hype, but they’ve also got a refreshing candidness over the material realities of making a television program. And yes, it’s new series obsessed, but unlike almost everything else coming out it continued to actually acknowledge the classic series, continuing the Time Team feature and cheerily reviewing all the DVDs.

Perhaps most interesting, however, are the reviews of the first series, which are given over to Rebecca Levene, editor of the New Adventures. Levene is, as one would expect, largely warm to the program, but she’s also thoughtful and willing to make detailed and intelligent critiques. The resulting tone is “very much in love with Doctor Who, but interested in it enough to find critique valuable.” Which is pretty much perfect and what Doctor Who Magazine should be.

And then of course there are the comics, which must be mentioned. They were, of course, very good in the Eighth Doctor era, and that quality continues here. There are blips - Robert Shearman turns in something of a career low with a four-parter that just doesn’t have enough room for its involved plot to breathe. But other bits are absolutely lovely; Gareth Roberts turns out two delightful strips, for instance. We should again pause and remember that Russell T Davies is both a massive comics fan and a devotee of the old Doctor Who Magazine strips - hence him offering the McGann/Eccleston regeneration to them and slipping kronkburgers into The Long Game. And in that regard the comic strips are a return to form - compelling side trips for Doctor Who. It’s too early by decades, in 2013, to say whether “The Love Invasion” will have the same impact as “The Iron Legion,” but it’s at least as good.

And there are other fun bits to be had. Gareth Roberts celebrating the old World Distributors annuals with a style pastiche about Doctor Who and Rose Taylor is one of the most wonderfully mad bits of nostalgia ever penned, and speaks volumes about what Doctor Who Magazine sees itself as being in the age of the new series: both chronicler and repository for the wide range of extra stuff that Doctor Who is.

We’d be remiss, in talking about all of this, if we did not also look at the 2006 Doctor Who Annual published by Panini Press. The annual is known for two things, both of which speak to the ways in which this sort of publication is taken seriously. The first, of course, is Steven Moffat’s “What I Did On My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow,” which is a prototype of Blink and is a wonderful bit of children’s adventure fantasy mixed with structural cleverness. While it lacks the Weeping Angels, there’s a sweet charm to it - remember that the annuals are really designed as Christmas presents - that actually makes it, to my mind, easier to love. If the kid-friendly Christmas annuals have a purpose other than sweet stories about ordinary people getting caught up in the Doctor’s adventures around the holidays then I don’t know what it is.

Well, except perhaps massive and joyful fanwank. Which brings us to Russell T Davies’s “Meet the Doctor,” a two page intro to the character that is actually just a brief history of the Time War that opens the floodgates of fanservice in a breathtaking way. In ten paragraphs we have references to a Terry Nation prose piece in the 1973 Radio Times special, Enlightenment, Resurrection of the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks, the TV Movie, Lungbarrow, The Apocalypse Element, State of Decay, Alan Moore’s Doctor Who comics, and The Web Planet, alongside a tease of the survival of the Master, including the phrase “you are not alone.” It is, needless to say, completely mental - but in a way that reaffirms the importance of things like this. It’s not the TV references that make it, but rather the acknowledgment of all sorts of weird spin-offs - the Radio Times special, Big Finish, the New Adventures, and the Doctor Who Magazine comics - that cement the tone of the piece as a giddy confirmation of Doctor Who’s history.

Which is, perhaps, the last piece of the puzzle here. Yes, there’s an ecstatic tone to much of the paratext here. Yes, the content of a lot of it - magazine, books, annual, et cetera - amounts to brand management to encourage financial devotion to being a Doctor Who fan. But if much of it amounts to an endless praise of the basic fact of making Doctor Who, we should perhaps remember that the people making Doctor Who are, in fact, drunk on the excitement of doing it, and that the fannish legacy of Doctor Who is a part of it. Put another way, it’s tough to be cynical about the commercialization of Doctor Who when it’s being headed up by the most joyfully obsessive Doctor Who fan it’s possible to imagine. Unless one is so bloody-minded about the public service mission of the BBC as to deny the sensibility of an official tie-in magazine (and its utility in bolstering the BBC’s overall budget is hard to argue with - let’s remember that Doctor Who exists in part to fund things like the low-earning high-cost BBC News), it’s hard to argue that Doctor Who Magazine in 2005 was not exactly what an official tie-in magazine should be.

Queers Dig Time Lords (Sigrid Ellis and Michael Damian Thomas, eds)

Sorry to throw two book reviews at you in a week, but, well, there were two books to review this week. Next week I'll use the off-day posts for angry polemics or something.

Mad Norwegian was kind enough to offer me a review copy of their upcoming Queers Dig Time Lords. Which is lovely of them. Lovelier, however, is the fact that they actually made the book good.

I mean, it's not like it was a huge risk. Mad Norwegian are probably the best publishers of Doctor Who-related material going right now. Their "As dig Bs" series is consistently and rightly acclaimed. I met several of the folks involved in the original book in the line, Chicks Dig Time Lords, at DePaul, and they were all wonderful. Perspectives on geek culture from people outside the normative band of what fans look like.

But this one is more important than that. I mean, I don't normally want to go for what I've heard memorably described as the Oppression Olympics whereby we try to figure out which repressed group has it worse. And in this case, I still don't want to. But nevertheless... well, let's just look at a quick list, shall we?

John Nathan-Turner, Matthew Waterhouse, Ian Levine, Gary Downie, Peter Grimwade, Gareth Roberts, Russell T Davies, John Barrowman, Gary Russell, Paul Magrs, Mark Gatiss, Phil Collinson. It's not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination. I'm 100% certain there are major figures not on it. It's just a list of prominent Doctor Who figures who I know off the top of my head are gay. And that's just off the top of my head.

Which is to say that there's a particular reason this book matters. Because gay Doctor Who fandom was and is a real thing. The reasons for this are not simple, but are at least articulable. Paul Magrs has a fantastic essay leading off this volume that does it - basically, between the lack of overt sexual desire on the part of the Doctor and the high camp of the series, it became very, very easy to perform a queer reading of it in which the Doctor is closeted. And many did. But note also that there's no coherent approach or vision of Doctor Who across that list: it's next to impossible to imagine any opinion on Doctor Who shared by Ian Levine, Gareth Roberts, and Mark Gatiss. Gay fandom is not some monolithic bloc of approaches. It's just very large, and has been around for decades now, albeit without any real acknowledgement from the series.

This is one of the very important things about The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances - it marks the point where that closet is finally detonated. And detonated in an explicitly queer way - the episode goes out of its way to confirm that the Doctor is not just a straight bloke. Whatever one might think about having a sexualized Doctor, it has to be understood: there's a huge, huge group of fans who put a lot of effort into the program for whom the Doctor's final "who with" is the cathartic endpoint of decades of marginalization.

Queers Dig Time Lords is not a book about saying things like that, though. At least not at length. It's a book about people's stories and the role Doctor Who has played in their lives. It's not an academic tome of soaring ambition and complexity. Who would want something that twee anyway? This is a fun anthology to read an essay or two out of a day over the course of a few weeks. It's not the analysis of why The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is so important to the history of gay Doctor Who fandom. It's the story of people watching it and realizing that their moment had come. And dozens of other stories. It's effectively an oral history of queer Doctor Who fandom, including the gay male fandom scene of the 80s and 90s that proved so influential in bringing the program back, but also including queer fans of the new series, gays and lesbians who liked the series but weren't active in fandom while it was off the air, and most other angles.

We have surely gotten to the point (he says with maximum irony) that we do not need any more episode-by-episode surveys of Doctor Who - the episodes themselves are so widely available that there's virtually nothing left to do in terms of recounting what Doctor Who is. This is what a useful book on Doctor Who looks like in 2013 - not some anniversary nostalgia piece but a document that shows its impact on the world.

Put another way, this is the secret of Doctor Who's alchemy - the impact it has on the world. Its material social progress. It's probably the most important book on Doctor Who that's coming out this year.

Queers Dig Time Lords is out from Mad Norwegian on June 4th. 

The Impossible Dream of a Thousand Alchemists (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances)

Ouch.

It’s May 21st, 2005. Akon remains at number one for the week, though the next week Oasis takes it with “Lyla.” The Black Eyed Peas, The Gorillaz, Jennifer Lopez, and Kelly Osbourne also chart, the latter with the surprisingly non-awful “One Word.” Since the last story George Galloway, recently elected as an MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, testified in front of the US Senate over the Oil-for-Food program. On the 21st itself Arsenal celebrates the Glazer takeover of Manchester United by beating them on penalties in the FA Cup final, the first time that cup was determined by penalties.

Penalties, of course, mean that the final ran long, which nearly led to it crashing into Doctor Who, which had been moved forward half an hour to accommodate Eurovision (it was Greece with “My Number One”), and the result led to The Empty Child getting pummelled in the ratings. Actually, the entire tail end of the first season slumped in the ratings, without even a bump for the season finale. But The Empty Child, though not the series low, bore the brunt of it, becoming the only Doctor Who episode of the first three seasons to fall out of the top twenty.

These days, of course, we know it as a classic and the high point of the first series. Everyone knows that. Even still, there’s something odd about its popularity. The watershed moment for it was probably its winning of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award, although its triumph in the Doctor Who Magazine season poll has to be taken as meaningful. But we should highlight how strange it is that the episodes won the Hugo given that they hadn’t even been screened in the US, which dominates the Hugos (which are presented at Worldcon, an international con that is nevertheless typically held in America). And there’s something indicatively weird about the nominations, where Doctor Who got three nominations, none of them for Russell T Davies’s episodes (which admittedly also, save for the finale, lined the bottom of the Doctor Who Magazine poll).

And, of course, we have the irksome problem of Moffat lurking. Because let’s be honest, this is Doctor Who by the current showrunner, and there’s no way that the gravity of “let’s analyze the series as it is now” can be avoided entirely, especially four days after a season finale. But what’s interesting is less comparing this to Moffat’s future time on the series and more to his past. Because this is in no way the pair of episodes that anyone expected Moffat to turn in. He may be known as the master of horror in Doctor Who, but that’s not at all what his past career pointed to. He was a sitcom writer who’d had a successful children’s show way back (and Press Gang played into him getting Doctor Who as much as Century Falls did for Davies).

More to the point, the reason Davies hired him for these two episodes wasn’t to do creepy horror. It was because Davies, based on his work on Coupling, thought he’d be perfect to introduce Captain Jack. In other words, Moffat got hired because he writes good sex comedies. And that influence shows heavily in this story. The fact that he’s very good at creepiness is in many ways a bonus on this story - it’s not what he was asked for. And while he is very good at it, he also in many ways got terribly lucky here, hitting both “creepy children” and “zombies” right before both trends in horror hit over-saturation. (Compare how much better “are you my mummy” works than the nursery rhyme at the end of Night Terrors).

The other thing to note about the horror within The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is that it extends out of the medial concerns of the episode. “Are you my mummy” is a snatch of sound that worms its way out of physical objects - phones and speakers and typewriters. (This is a phenomenally common trope for Moffat. It’s not, as people usually suggest, a fascination with repeated phrases, but rather with glitchy technology.) In one sense this picks up on a discarded concern of Rose, or, more accurately, of Rose’s invocation of Spearhead From Space, namely the transformation of mundane objects into sources of fear. But there’s a larger issue going on with it - a willingness to craft horror out of the materiality of Doctor Who. The refrain of “are you my mummy” emerges, in theory, from “anything with a speaker grille” (plus a typewriter because Moffat had to write a scene very quickly when the episode was underrunning), which is to say, from anything with the characteristics of a television. “Are you my mummy” is medial - something that comes out of the episode itself.

This ties to another major concern of these episodes - something that does distinguish them from anything that’s come before. More than any other episode of Doctor Who to date, this is one that luxuriates in its structure. There’s a willingness to just spend time enjoying the basic format of Doctor Who throughout this story. This isn’t just true in Moffat’s obvious love of lampshading tropes and slipping in off-handed references to absurdities like the Doctor secretly being Father Christmas, but in a larger sense of the story being willing to spend time enjoying its premises.

In this regard it’s one of the best arguments for the utility of two-parters. Curiously it’s not because of the space for worldbuilding - we’ll eventually get to a two-parter that focuses on worldbuilding, but that’s not The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. This story doesn’t worry about worldbuilding, instead relying on an extremely familiar milieu - World War II. Instead this story needs two episodes so that it can enjoy the space to linger in its dramatic beats. Whether it be the scene where Nancy talks her way out of getting caught by Mr. Lloyd, or the extended sections of fear and dread as the Doctor, Rose, and Jack are chased around the hospital by gas mask people, this is a story that revels in having the time and space to enjoy being Doctor Who. And it does. More than anything else this season, this is a story that just drips with its own love of being Doctor Who. Down to the tiniest details, like Richard Wilson’s delightfully macabre delivery of “don’t touch the flesh,” this is a story that is just giddily thrilled to be a Doctor Who story.

This is reflected in part in the fact that this has by far the most complex plot of anything we’ve seen this season. Let’s briefly attempt to summarize the plots of every story, shall we? Aliens invade Earth by controlling plastic, and the Doctor stops them with anti-plastic; someone tries to destroy a space station to make a profit, and the Doctor catches them; evil gas aliens possess corpses, and the Doctor blows them up; aliens take over Britain to run an elaborate con, and the Doctor blows them up; the Doctor discovers a Dalek in an underground bunker, but it blows itself up,; the Doctor overthrows an evil news station; Rose tries to change history to save her father, and her father sacrifices himself to fix the problem. All pretty easy and, dare I say it, movie poster.

But what do we have with The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances? People grow gas mask faces and look for their mothers because an alien spaceship has released little robots that heal people but have misunderstood humanity, and the Doctor saves the day by getting a teen mother to admit that she is patient zero’s mother. It is, as plots go, considerably more complex than anything we’ve yet seen. One of the things The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances luxuriates in, in fact, is its own exposition. It’s a strange thing for Moffat to be good at, but the fact of the matter is, and I suspect even his fiercest critics would have to give him this, he writes the best exposition scenes in the world.

Much of this comes from his sitcom training. Moffat is very good at making exposition scenes where the exposition is just the subject matter of a series of jokes or character moments. Look at the final explanation in The Doctor Dances, where the Doctor explains the plot to us. It starts with the Doctor asking Rose to explain obvious details of the plot, namely that a Chula warship would include nanogenes. Then we get Jack realizing the what’s going on and reacting in horror, then leaving space for the Doctor to fill in an explanation. In every case the audience is carefully prodded to realize what’s happening almost in sync with the characters, so that the explanations are confirmations of what the audience already suspects. From there we go to Nancy obviously understanding more about Jamie than the Doctor does, and the Doctor being a bit dense, so that, again, we start to realize what Nancy knows that the Doctor doesn’t. So again, when we get the explanation that Nancy is Jamie’s mother, it’s something we’ve already started to suspect.

It’s terribly, terribly well done, and is something that Moffat has remained excellent at throughout his career. It’s very much a writerly trick, and I suspect it is largely writers of various stripes who look at scenes like that and are really in awe of them. Because they’re very, very hard to structure. Moffat has always been a bit of a show-off of a TV writer, whether with the nonlinear structure of Joking Apart, the tightly formatted Press Gang episodes like “Monday-Tuesday” and “The Last Word,” or the eccentric Coupling episodes like “Split” and “Nine and a Half Minutes.” He’s always liked baroque structures of storytelling, and he’s always been good at them, taking advantage of them to carefully manage the order in which the audience learns information. But The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances is different. It’s not that Moffat has never done “straight” storytelling - it was still the bread and butter of his writing. But he’d never done anything quite so utterly complex and convoluted in its structure that wasn’t based around farce. And in its own way it’s just as show-offy.

Look, for instance, at that opening sequence of Rose on the barrage balloon - a sequence that exists in part because Moffat was pulled aside and reminded that he has a budget now, since he’d only ever worked on sitcoms. And so, laughing the whole way, he decided to test the limits of that. And so what we get is a sequence that exists just out of the pure joy that it can - that Doctor Who can have such an outrageous set piece, and that it can do it for no reason other than the traditional separating the Doctor and Rose and getting Rose to meet up with an important supporting character. It’s indulgent, just like the “sonic screwdriver mends barbed wire” sequence, just like the complex plot. But it’s joyfully so.

But this would be an empty masturbation of an episode if all it had was the successful introduction of exceedingly complex plots to Doctor Who. It’s the fact that this sort of luxuriating in the fact that it can be Doctor Who and have a plot this mad is used for so many other purposes. The first and most obvious of these is what Moffat got the commission for - the introduction of Captain Jack. I don’t want to peek too far ahead, but since this is the only time Moffat writes Captain Jack, I may as well suggest that the nagging problem with the entire remainder of Captain Jack’s story is that Russell T Davies was dead right that Moffat was the best person to write Jack, and, more to the point, that Davies never manages to write him with quite the excessive roguish charm that Moffat brings to it.

In essence Captain Jack, at this stage of the operation, is a square-jawed American action hero who is played to be the campest thing ever. It’s worth reflecting on the fact that it is Moffat, not Davies, who is responsible for introducing a raftload of queer content to Doctor Who. You can scour the first eight episodes to your heart’s content, but save for the off-handed “she’s gay and he’s an alien” joke in Rose there’s nothing. Then Moffat sweeps in suddenly the whole show is as queer as folk. And it’s not just Jack, who was, after all, created by Davies originally. The queerness is reflected throughout the story - in Mr. Lloyd’s secret, in Algy, and, of course, in the Doctor’s bit about how the future of humanity involves going out into the stars, meeting all sorts of new species, and… dancing.

Because this is the underlying metaphor of the story. Underneath all the creepy horror, what we have is Moffat writing a story about sexual freedom. The worst thing in the world - the thing that will absolutely kill each and every one of us - is if we are sexually repressed and dishonest about our sexuality. It’s Nancy’s need to hide the shame of her sexual activity from everyone, Jamie included, that causes all of this. Sexual repression, including, crucially, self-repression as in Mr. Lloyd is shown to be cowardly and destructive. And the futuristic, utopian vision of humanity is as the great sluts of the universe.

And all of this is done with a sense of real, ecstatic joy. Which parallels it nicely with the sense of joy the episode takes in its own structure and Doctor Whoness. This is not an entirely incidental metaphor either. We’ve skirted several times past the intersections of gay culture and Doctor Who fandom in the UK, and why that was the case. We’ll do it again too, but for now let’s just take it as basically axiomatic that “being a Doctor Who fan” and “being gay” are culturally related experiences. And by writing a story about the joyousness of sexual freedom that is simultaneously a giddy love letter to being Doctor Who, Moffat closes the circle.

But there’s more to the story than that. It’s not just a hymn to sexual freedom in which it’s treated as a metaphor for geekiness. It’s also a story that is unabashedly and unhesitatingly patriotic. This is almost necessary given the World War II setting. It’s interesting, in many ways, that the series has so rarely done World War II - it took until 1989 for it to ever do a story set in the World War II era. And yet The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances waltzes in like this is as normal a setting for Doctor Who as Victorian England or the present day. Part of that is that the story creates a viable aesthetic very quickly. The tension of the Battle of Britain, at night, with the gas mask children is a very sharp, compelling visual aesthetic.

But it leaves Moffat in the odd position of doing the definitive version of World War II Doctor Who. And unsurprisingly, he turns on the patriotism, because, well, that’s the national mythology here. The bit about a damp little island saying no is particularly straightforward. But let’s look deeper at that patriotism. Because there are other bits that stand out - the Doctor’s praise of the welfare state, for instance (and as Moffat delights in pointing out on the DVD commentary, watch Richard Wilson’s facial expression at that line as he, in Moffat’s words, takes credit for it), or the episode’s best line, describing Nancy and her gang as between Marxism in action and a West End musical. This is an episode deeply concerned with social justice and with the material.

So to sum up, what we have is a story about sexual freedom and its links to other kinds of joy and pleasure. One in which that - our pleasure and our joy - is treated as the thing that humanity can aspire towards. Towards dancing - a beautiful metaphor for sex that stresses the exuberant joy of it. And one in which the reasons to love Britain are pop music and the welfare state. It’s one of the most unabashedly and beautifully utopian moments in Doctor Who, joined with the heartbreakingly beautiful “everybody lives” moment. For my money, incidentally, the single best moment of Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor is the choked begging, “give me a day like this. Give me this one,” and how it couples with his ecstatic, triumphant joy as “just this once, everybody lives.” It’s one of a handful of moments in Doctor Who that I reliably choke up at. Death is stopped and reversed because we accept ourselves and our desires and just decide to dance.

And, of course, it’s done in a deliciously creepy episode that worms its way into your head. When last we talked about Doctor Who and childhood we noted that the one period it’s really easy to connect them is the Hinchcliffe era. And no surprise, because it’s the era where Doctor Who was reliably good at horror - when it did stories that stuck in your head. Moffat was thirteen for The Ark in Space, and its impact on him is well documented (he wrote the intro for the reissue of the novelization, in fact). And I can relate to that vividly - I adored The Ark in Space (my third Doctor Who story ever), but found it sufficiently disturbing that I never actually rewatched it until adulthood. Because it was just too disturbing. And was, accordingly, the most remembered bit of Doctor Who I ever watched. Because as I’ve said, the best children’s media is the stuff that sits at the edge of what they can handle - that leaves a bit unresolved that the viewer picks at for years and decades later, trying to understand what it was they saw and were entranced by. The Hinchcliffe era was a masterpiece of this. And that is what Moffat brought to the table that nobody, based on his prior work, would have expected: the ability to make Doctor Who that will lodge in the minds of children for decades after. The ability to use horror well.

Maybe it wasn’t watched by as many people as other things this season. It didn’t have to be. This is the story in Series One that is made to be remembered. To lurk in the memories of people who, twenty, thirty, even forty years from now, will make the art of the future. A generation of kids remembering vividly their joyous terror of a story that tells them that love and sex and joy are good, that death can be fought against meaningfully, and that we are sustained by our relationships and kindnesses towards each other.

And this is branded, inexorably, in the psychochronography of a generation - one of the most lasting marks the series has ever or will ever make. And for my money, the single most beautiful. A sublimely well-done story that could only be Doctor Who, with one of the most pristinely beautiful moral centers of any Doctor Who story. It is perhaps not the best Doctor Who story ever. But it is, I think, the best work of alchemy the series has ever produced, and if it never soars to these heights again, that’s fine. That it even approaches these heights is enough to justify it.

But it doesn’t just approach them. Not always.

Because some days are special. Some days are so, so blessed. Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair, and the Doctor comes to call…

Everybody lives.

S. Alexander Reed - Assimilate

Let's start with the disclosures. Alex is a dear friend and colleague - my coauthor on the upcoming book on Flood, in fact. I've known him for over a decade; he was in my wedding party. I'm in the acknowledgments of this book. My friendship with him is one of those that is more an ongoing serialized conversation. We see each other a couple times a year and the conversation calmly picks up with litanies of things we've each squirreled away in the corners of our brains with mental notes to tell each other.

Alex is appallingly tall and prone to exaggeration. He is one of those people who monopolizes the available talent pool. He's a ferociously insightful and well-read critic, an adept rock star, a phenomenal conversationalist, and damnably handsome to boot. Working with him on the Flood book consisted of a workflow in which I banged out obscene amounts of verbiage in a short time and he painstakingly worked it over and added to it until it was actually a good book. 

Beyond that, my intellectual debt to him is so massive as to be impossible to fully account for. The list of things and ideas he introduced me to is simply massive. He is one of those influences so fundamental that to attempt to encapsulate it in some list of things he introduced me to feels desperately inadequate. And reading Assimilate is thus a terribly strange experience for me - a blur of past conversations where I realize these ideas were being worked out. I hit a passage on Guy Debord and remember vividly the conversation picking him up from the airport where I excitedly told him that he needed to read Society of the Spectacle. I nod along enthusiastically at his descriptions of 1970s England unable to begin to tell  what bits are where talking to him influenced me, what bits are the other way around, and what bits are just us conversing into separate Word documents. And there's nothing like a way to tell.

Which is to say that this is in no way a detached critical book review. This is unapologetic fanboying of the highest order. Because if there is someone I most consider a fellow traveler in terms of critical approach, it is S. Alexander Reed. And with Assimilate there finally exists a proper monument demonstrating what I truly and unhesitatingly believe to be one of the greatest creative and critical minds in the world today. 

Oddly, if irrelevantly, the topic is not one I am by any measure passionate about. Like most people, the prospect of epically long songs consisting of little more than grinding machinery and featureless noise is not my idea of fun listening. On the other hand, there exist subjects that are somewhat more fun to read about than to experience, and industrial music, like the Pertwee era, is perhaps a prime example. It is as easy to not want to listen to Throbbing Gristle's "Very Friendly," which is eighteen minutes of grinding and narration about the Moors murders. It is also very easy to read excitedly about it and frontman Genesis P-Orridge, an occultist who refers to themself in the plural because of their efforts to become a pandrogyne with their late wife. 

But what is perhaps more important is that it is a topic that Alex is profoundly passionate about. The book is frighteningly thorough in the way that only something by a devoted fan can possibly be. This is not to say that it is inaccessible - I know little enough about the topic and remained thoroughly engrossed. But it is detailed and rich - a thorough critical history instead of a spotter's guide. 

This also means that it is expansive in a way other works on the subject are not. Alex does not limit his study of industrial music to the "purist" section of its history, treating everything that came after the genre discovered dance beats as a tragic decline. Indeed, the book is frank about the fact that, iconclastically brilliant as Clock DVA might be, the genre's prospects of any mainstream impact were muted prior to, say, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, or KMFDM. Far from treating this as a bad thing, Alex is pragmatic about it, recognizing, if you will, that the secret of alchemy is material social progress. 

This pragmatism also means that the book hits a satisfying midpoint between fannish (over)enthusiasm and the critical detachment (or, in its more pernicious cases, nihilism) of academic work. It's the sort of book that includes both a meticulous flaying of the failures of industrial music to adequately tackle race and an autobiographical account of his abjected psychic submission to the sonic assault of a Carter-Tutti concert. One that includes the passage "I am an electrified thing, gnashing in spasm but not self-destructive, because there is in this moment no self to destroy. I am making noise now, resonating with the music, its collateral damage. Sex noises and fuck words" and the passage "Like nearly all western popular styles, industrial music derives its rhythms from African Diaspora music, but notably it also celebrates a political and musical kinship with postwar experimental jazz. However, industrial music more readily appreciates this music's experimental status than its racial origins." Which is to say, a sort of book like no other.

At its heart, however, it is a book about the same topic as this blog: the interplay between the margins of the avant garde and mainstream popularity, and the way in which radical thought, whether aesthetic or political, must endlessly traverse that gap in order to make any sort of progress. It's a book about the heights of magical and conceptual exploration, and how to get from there to a decent 4/4 dance beat. It's a book about magic, northern England, extremism, and the indifferent line between changing the world and burning it to the ground. 

While no two projects have 1:1 overlap in their audiences, I have trouble imagining how anybody who enjoys this blog would not enjoy this book. Your world will be a stranger and more wonderful place once you've read it. 

Assimilate is available in both the US and UK from Oxford University Pres.

You Were Expecting Someone Else 21 (The Monsters Inside)

The Monsters Inside is one of the first three books in what is unofficially called the New Series Adventures, although even that name seems, in hindsight, ever so slightly wrong. The name derives from the two other BBC Books lines that existed in 2005, the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the Past Doctor Adventures, the former of which we covered from January through April, and the latter of which we looked at alongside each of the past doctors. And the name picks up on this, implying as it does that the New Series Adventures are going to exist alongside the other two lines.

In hindsight this is rubbish. Neither the Eighth Doctor Adventures nor the Past Doctor Adventures were going to survive the year. We knew that about the Eighth Doctor Adventures, actually, but as of May, when this came out alongisde The Clockwise Man and Winner Takes All to launch the New Series Adventures, the theory was that the Past Doctor Adventures were going to keep running indefinitely, with the Eighth Doctor range being folded into it. Indeed, in May the Eighth Doctor Range hadn’t actually quite wrapped yet, with The Gallifrey Chronicles coming out the next month, alongside Eccleston’s regeneration.

All of which is to say that while to the mainstream Doctor Who was a titanic hit that was coming back for a second season and was set to be one of the BBC’s crown jewels, to fans May of 2005 was a bewildering period in which there were in fact three incumbent Doctors, the Paul McGann era having yet to resolve, the Eccleston era ongoing, and the Tennant era announced. And the question of what the auxiliary merchandise for the series would be like was still very much an open one.

Because there were, in fact, a lot of ways the merchandise could go. It could, of course, target fans. That was what Doctor Who merchandise had been doing since the 1980s, after all. That’s why the Doctor Who Cookbook and $125 Doctor Who stained glass windows made for selling in America as pledge awards for PBS existed - because adult fans could be trusted to buy this crap. And certainly this type of merchandise still exists, as apparently there are people who want to spend fifty pounds for a box set of the Pandorica chair and a River Song action figure. Or, for that matter, thirty pounds for a Winston Churchill action figure bundled with a Dalek with tea tray accessory. (And that’s just the new series. You can also, these days, spend thirty-five quid for action figures of Peri and Sil from Vengeance on Varos)

A reasonable person might have expected this to be how all of the new series merchandise would work: high end collectors items for the undiscerning Doctor Who fan with an excess of disposable income. This was basically how the novels had worked in the wilderness years, with Virgin and then BBC Books pumping out two books every month in what was actually the biggest flood of new Doctor Who material in the series’ history, especially once Big Finish got in on the act with audios.

And then there was the second tradition - that of, basically, all of the merchandise prior to the 1980s. This merchandise mostly fell into two camps: expensive stuff you got at Christmas or for your birthday, and deliciously cheap stuff you could buy with your pocket money. Implicit in this is that the target audience for the merchandise was primarily kids.

We haven’t actually talked about Doctor Who as a kids show much since the Hinchcliffe era, where the interplay of quite dark horror and childhood television watching formed a major part of our analysis. There’s an entire rhetoric of thought about Doctor Who being for children that’s difficult to grapple with. On the one hand it’s unmistakably the case that Doctor Who is a children’s show, both in structure and, when it’s a healthy and popular show, in terms of a large portion of its actual material audience. On the other, a large portion of its audience isn’t children, and since we’re all here it probably wouldn’t do well for us to slag ourselves off as idiots who are making too much of a kids’ show.

It is often difficult to reconstruct childhood engagement with Doctor Who. It is something we tend to understand only years later, after the children have grown up and channeled their memories of Doctor Who into something else - often, as it happens, more Doctor Who. And childhood memories of Doctor Who can often be misleading: the Troughton era, for instance, is remembered for its monsters and not the parts that, to a modern eye, are far more memorable. But we can still reconstruct certain facts. And one of the most basic facts about childhood engagement with Doctor Who is, historically, the Target novelizations.

Again, those interested in seeing those books covered in more detail can consult past entries, particularly those on The Smugglers, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and Battlefield, all of which dealt heavily with the novelized versions of those stories. But the short form is this: starting in 1964 with David Whitaker’s novelization of The Daleks, and properly getting underway with Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion and Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters, published together at the start of 1974 in a manner not entirely unlike the triple release of The Clockwise Men, The Monsters Inside, and Winner Takes All, one of the most important forms of Doctor Who merchandise - indeed, by most sane accounts the most important - was a series of short books adapting television stories to prose.

The reasons for their importance was varied, but had much to do with the fact that they had a sort of breathlessly functional prose provided by Terrance Dicks and that before the invention of the VCR the novelizations were the only way to re-experience a story after transmission. And, perhaps more importantly, with the fact that they were quite cheap. The result was that children grew up on these books, and in several cases the books are actually better remembered than the stories they adapt.

So when it came time to design tie-in books for the new series there really was a choice. On the one hand was the still-existent fan-centric model of merchandise, whereby the books would be aimed at particularly obsessive adult fans. On the other was the older for-kids tradition of inexpensive books. But each had their problems. The BBC Books line had been in serious trouble even before the new series was announced due to the fact that they were overproducing underwhelming material and hemorrhaging readers as a result. But the novelization model was equally underwhelming in the age of the DVD set and the dawning age of streaming video. A key part of why the novelizations worked was that the stories they adapted were impossible to experience in any other way. In 2005, that was clearly not going to be the case. (One of the injunctions repeatedly given by Davies to everyone on the series was that no matter how well the series did, they should at least aim to have something they’ll be proud to own the DVD set of - a concept that’s baffling to try to apply to any previous era of Doctor Who.)

And so what we got was… a rather strange midpoint. The New Series Adventures are, from their very name, aimed at adult fans. Their pricing and format pushes in that direction as well - unlike the Eighth Doctor and Past Doctor Adventures they’re hardcovers running about twice the price. These are not books aimed at being picked up by kids with their pocket money. On the other hand, they’re shorter than the other two lines - only about 250 pages - and consciously written at a younger audience (remembering that, to start at least, the BBC Books line was meant to be aimed at a younger audience than the Virgin one - though it’s tough to argue seriously that that mandate held to the end of the line). So what we have are kids books that are sold to adult audiences.

The content is no saner. On the one hand The Monsters Inside is a bit of a continuity parade, sneaking in references to the Kraals, Ice Warriors, and Meeps. On the other, it has bland pseudo-Dicksian paragraphs introducing the Doctor and the TARDIS (“TARDIS stood for ‘Time and Relative Dimension in Space’. This was supposed to explain how you could disguise a massive control room inside a poky police box and travel anywhere and any time in the universe, but it left Rose little the wiser.”) and summing up the events of Rose, apparently on the off-chance that anybody who accidentally spent seven quid on a Doctor Who book without knowing what Doctor Who was. On the third hand are rather actively disturbing moments like one of the prison guards referring to Rose as the Doctor’s “bit of human skirt.”

And, of course, there’s the writers. Five of the first six books came from mainstays of the BBC Books line: Justin Richards, Stephen Cole, Jacqueline Rayner, and Steve Lyons. (We’ll deal with the sixth in just over a week.) The line was still overseen by Justin Richards, who had overseen the disastrously stupid amnesia plot line that marred the latter years of the Eighth Doctor Adventures. The Monsters Inside comes from Stephen Cole, writer of the equally disastrously stupid The Ancestor Cell. It’s not that the BBC Books lines were unmitigated disasters - actually there are some really good books out of them. But they weren’t straightforward successes either.

It would, of course, also be a mistake to suggest that the New Series Adventures were completely beholden to the past. The Monsters Inside is a Slitheen story, drawing primarily from within the existing continuity of the new series, such as it was. And, as we noted, the books are almost ludicrously deferential to the possibility that someone might be entering Doctor Who through anything other than the massively popular television series. The result is a book that feels as though it’s lacking in audience.

Which is in many ways secondary to the fact that it’s lacking in point. There’s a vague sense that this might be a book about prison abuses (another piece of evidence in the increasingly convoluted question of who this book exists for), but if so only in the most superficial of ways. Mainly it’s trying to be thrilling, which is a not entirely absurd goal, but which pales so starkly in comparison to what the television series has been doing for the past eight weeks that it seems almost bizarre to do this and call it Doctor Who. And this is tough to escape - even the covers, frankly, feel like lazy attempts to look like generic and harmless tie-in merchandise. It's next to impossible to imagine a good K-KLAK coming out of this line.

Which is the problem this approach faces, at the end of the day. The Target novelizations were not great works of literature, but they were still basically A-list Doctor Who. Yes, some years the A-list included The Monster of Pleadon or The Android Invasion, but they were the proper Doctor Who stories recounted deftly. This, on the other hand, is the skippable Doctor Who in a world where Doctor Who is omnipresent already. If anything the thing they correspond with best are the old World Distributors annuals. But even those existed for a period where the audience was starved of Doctor Who at all, not just starved for a new episode.

These are at best for kids starved for new Doctor Who. Obsessives who simply cannot wait for a new episode of Doctor Who. And, more to the point, who have adopted Doctor Who as the thing they’ll ask their parents for. They are tools for people to commit themselves early to a phase of Doctor Who fandom, and ideally for a lifetime of it. In this regard there’s something ever so slightly unsettling about them, especially inasmuch as The Monsters Inside is actually referenced in Boomtown, giving it a curiously “official” feel that feels ever so slightly cynical. It’s a sense that Doctor Who’s main purpose is to make a lot of money. Its method in doing that might be “make good television,” and if so, it’s a rather lovely method, but it also feels ever so slightly like a Rupert Murdoch clone wearing the Reithian public service mission of the BBC as a skinsuit.

And yet there’s a possibility here. These books may be a small part of Doctor Who and a not very good one, but those have existed at every single turn of Doctor Who, including the fan-driven memorabilia era of the 1980s, and have had their odd influences on the program. Gareth Roberts nicks imagery from the Patrick Troughton Polystyle comics. Grant Morrison name-checks the Fish-Men of Kandelinga. Frobisher appears in a Rob Shearman audio, then a Rob Shearman audio gets adapted for television. The Monsters Inside includes a reference to the Meeps, from early Doctor Who Magazine comics. The Pestacons was mistaken as an important story worth novelizing. Russell T Davies worked kronkburgers into The Long Game. Odd things recur, such that we might, when some 2042 television producer finally caves to pressure to bring back the Slitheen for the Christmas special even though they only appeared in two stories nearly forty years ago, we might just get an off-handed reference to their sibling family the Blathereen.

In other words, whatever the motivation here, this is the sort of thing that has existed any time Doctor Who has been in a generally healthy state. Its quality is almost beside the point, as is the clarity of its purpose. When Doctor Who is doing well, it generates strange auxiliary merchandise. That, at least, is happening.

Sunday Pancaking

Well, I'm not going to make a habit out of having two weekend threads, but my dialogue with Mac Rogers on The Name of the Doctor just went up on Slate, so that's probably there and fun to read. Or at least there and fun to have written. Thanks again to Mac and the folks at Slate for letting me play.

So while I'm opening a second front in the "let's all discuss Name of the Doctor" battle, I figure I'll toss out two (completely unrelated) questions to my readers to see if anyone can help.

First, I've been searching for months now for any copy of Springhill, Russell T Davies's two-season apocalyptic soap with writing by Gareth Roberts and Paul Cornell. This seems a complete wipeout - nobody is getting anywhere close. It's a massive missing link in the history of Davies's Doctor Who, and there's barely any information about it out there.

Second, and thinking ahead instead of back, I'd like to do a post on Outpost Gallifrey sometime during Series Two. Ideally adjacent to Love and Monsters. Unfortunately, the forum is long since gone off the Internet. I don't suppose that anyone, for some bewilderingly freakish reason, has an archive of the long lost forum, and specifically of the threads that sprung up around that episode? If so, you're a bigger digital packrat than even I am, but please do get in touch.

In both cases e-mailing me is probably more sensible than discussing in comments.